ion would have
taken place, and how that action would have affected the bystanders; a
sort of second-sight, occasionally rising to the point of revealing, not
merely the material aspect of things and people, but the emotional value
of the event in the eyes of the painter. Thus, for instance, Tintoret
concentrated a beam of sunlight into the figure of Christ before Pilate,
not because he supposed Christ to have stood in that sunlight, but
because the white figure, shining yet ghost-like, seemed to him, perhaps
unconsciously, to indicate the position of the betrayed Saviour among
the indifference and wickedness of the world. Hence I would divide all
imaginative art, particularly that of the old Italian masters, into art
which stirs our own associations, and suggests to us trains of thought
and feeling perhaps unknown to the artist, and art which exhibits a
scene or event foreign to ourselves, and placed before us with a
deliberate intention. Both are categories of imaginative activity
due to inborn peculiarities of character; but one of them, namely, the
suggestive, is probably spontaneous, and quite unintentional, hence
never asked for by the public, nor sought after by the artist; while the
other, self-conscious and intentional, is therefore constantly sought
after by the artist, and bargained for by the public. I shall begin
with the latter, because it is the recognised commodity: artistic
imagination, as bought and sold in the market, whether of good quality
or bad.

II

The painters of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century,
developing the meagre suggestions of Byzantine decoration, incorporating
the richer inventions of the bas-reliefs of the Pisan sculptors and
of the medallions surrounding the earliest painted effigies of holy
personages, produced a complete set of pictorial themes illustrative
of Gospel history and of the lives of the principal saints. These
illustrative themes--definite conceptions of situations and definite
arrangements of figures--became forthwith the whole art's stock, universal
and traditional; few variations were made from year to year and from
master to master, and those variations resolved themselves continually
back into the original type. And thus on, through the changes in artistic
means and artistic ends, until the Italian schools disappeared finally
before the schools of France and Flanders. Let us take a striking example.
The presentation of the Virgin remains unaltere